Why do we suffer? An alternate take

In the first of two essays last week (why do we have a sense of self?) I explored how neuroscience might explain the emergence of self-consciousness or self-awareness. In this second essay I want to use an evolutionary-biology perspective and look at how the emergence of consciousness has left us with the problem of suffering; and why the Buddhist response to suffering is so useful.

In Buddhist terms we could say that we suffer because we are selfish, especially in relationship to sensory stimuli. I've explored this in a number of blog posts recently. [1] In order to find happiness we seek to obtain, maintain and retain pleasurable experiences. These are, however, inherently impermanent and unsatisfactory so that we find life itself unsatisfactory. But why are we this way? Why evolve a faculty that only makes us miserable?

Actually as social animals, despite our sense of being independent selves, we are not inherently selfish: rather we are instinctively gregarious, cooperative and empathetic. As humans, indeed as primates, these are very much part of our genetic heritage. Although there is conflict and competition in all primate groups, they are characterised by a high level of helping each other and working together for the benefit of the troop. So why do we become selfish? I think that the problem is a result of our own success - or because our success at exploiting the environment has outstripped our genetic evolution. We are genetically adapted, to take two examples, to scarce resources (e.g. diets low in sugar and fat) and small group sizes. Pleasurable sensations help motivate us to find and assess the goodness of food, and to contribute to the social group through, for example, cooperation and social grooming; while unpleasant sensations helps us avoid spoiled food and danger for instance. In short we are programmed to experience pleasure as happiness because in the world that we are genetically adapted to this makes us more successful.

About 10,000 years ago we humans began to use our ability to think ahead to our advantage. We began to cultivate food crops rather than scavenging, and to domesticate animals which we had previously only hunted. The result was a reliable food surplus for the first time in history. It was still somewhat related to climate patterns - drought was not unknown - but we could mitigate that through irrigation. We ate well and as a result grew stronger, lived longer, and our groups began to get larger. We began to make large scale permanent dwellings - the first cities seem to date from around 9,000 years ago. Large scale cities with hundreds of thousands of residents became possible as agriculture intensified. Civilisation provides many benefits to us individually and collectively. Importantly it makes reproductive success more likely, much more likely, which is positive in evolutionary terms.

It is sometimes said that humans have stopped evolving but this is not true. [2] It is true however that our cultural and technological evolution has outstripped our genetic evolution by orders of magnitude. In most cases we live in an environment to which are not genetically adapted. This is the result of a trend that began thousands of generations ago, and means that we have to consciously adapt to our circumstances using our ability to learn and innovate. As societies become more complex, we have to be better at learning and teaching these acquired skills because our genetic adaptation is less relevant. It's a self-reinforcing cycle, and the speed of change is increasing!

In a world of generalised surplus the relationship between pleasure and happiness becomes more abstract. [3] Once the relationship becomes abstract then it is a bit like abandoning the gold standard behind money - it's difficult to know the value of anything. The result is that pleasure becomes an end in itself. Similarly any pain, or the lack of pleasure, is bad and to be avoided. This gives rise to two extremes: on the one hand we theorise about an absolutely abstract ultimate pleasure (or equally an absence of pain) which awaits us (usually) in an afterlife; on the other hand we might decide or there is no greater good than pleasure here and now. These are the two extremes of eternalism and nihilism.

As group sizes soar we not only split into increasingly disparate factions, but we become accustomed to being surrounded by strangers to whom we have no social ties - they are not related and not part of our troop and we owe them nothing. Larger social groups require new social structures with arbitrary relationships. We may never meet those who lead our community for instance, or even their deputies. I've never personally spoken to a member of parliament of any country for instance. The result is alienation and a feeling of disconnection between us and the people around us.

So we find ourselves pursuing pleasures with considerable energy and ingenuity, but surrounded and led by strangers, and over several hundred generations this becomes the cultural norm. This is our norm. It creates a deep dissonance within us - emotional as well as cognitive - because we are overstimulated on the one hand, and alienated on the other. We find ourselves plagued by diseases caused by diet such as heart disease, obesity, bowel cancer and diabetes; by drug problems, alienation and depression; and by conflict, crime, civil strife and violence. To some extent this is balanced out, though, because at the same time this dissonance has driven the production of great art, music, literature and drama as people try to give expression to something more wholesome. However we are left with a considerable and worsening problem.

Eventually some individuals began to emerge who used their powers of reflection to examine the human situation. During the so-called Axial Age (ca 800 BCE - 200 BCE) many such individuals appeared including Lao-tzu, K'ung-tzu, Isaiah, Zoroaster, Yajñavalkya, Mahāvīra, Gautama, Pythagoras, and Socrates. One thing they all seem to have done is call into question the pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself, and encourage us to relate to each other in more wholesome ways. The greatest of these individuals was Gautama, the Buddha - he saw the nature of the problem more clearly than any other human being before or since. Since the Axial age we Westerners have swung between puritanism and hedonism, from eternalism to nihilism in response to our inner dissonance without any great success in quelling it. For some time now some of us have been exploring the Buddha's middle-way, although in Britain's last census more people identified their religion as Jedi (0.7%) than as Buddhist (0.3%).

Neither hedonism nor puritanism address the underlying relationship we have with sensory stimulus, especially pleasure, so neither can resolve the fundamental dissonance, nor produce lasting happiness. The extent of suffering in the world (various 20th century genocides for instance) makes belief in God untenable for any thinking person, but the abandonment of old values in reaction to the loss of faith has had a devastating effect on society. Plurality has lead to moral relativity and reinforced the confusion over values. The sad truth is that as much as some of us find the choice and variety of contemporary life exciting and stimulating, the majority feel overwhelmed and anxious or angry (fuelled in part by a media with a vested interest in stimulating precisely these emotions). Increasingly people are closing their minds and hearts - or turning for example to drugs [4]; or the ersatz, but less challenging, community provided by the internet. [5]

So we suffer because, as a side effect of civilisation, we have an aberrant relationship with sensory stimulation. Instead of experiencing ourselves as being part of a complex web of relationships with people and the environment, we feel isolated and alienated. We are overstimulated most of the time, and continually stoke the fire because we are convinced that pleasure is happiness in a generalised abstract sense. Selfishness is a by-product of this process, not a cause - which is to turn traditional Buddhist narratives on their head. Civilisation has been a two edged sword which may suggest why periods of barbarism punctuate the history of civilisation. Buddhist practice offers the best way forward because it directly addresses these problems with practical methods and suggestions. [6]


Notes

1. Examples of recent posts on our relationship to the senses include:
   
   • In the Seen...
   • The Simile of the Chariot.
   • How is suffering created.
2. see for example 'Humans are still evolving - and it's happening faster than ever'. The Guardian 11.12.2007.
3. Here I have to make a broad generalisation which glosses over some important questions such as endemic poverty and whether the subsistence farmer is better off than the hunter gatherer etc. Certainly agriculture is at different stages around the world (I've seen farmers using all-wood ox-drawn ploughs in India for instance), but there has been a general trend towards more sophistication. My remarks are intended to apply mainly to my audience who I take to be English speaking internet users.
4. It is ironic the extent to which terrorism, supposedly the greatest threat to our society, is funded by western drug habits - certainly Middle-Eastern terrorists are funded by opiate production, and opiate production is driven by the demand for illicit opiates in the west.
5. See my comments on virtual community [19.9.08]
6. Although Buddhist practice is the overall theme of this blog I did summarise the entire Buddhist path in a way which is relevant to the current post in another two-parter back in 2005: - part one (generosity, ethics, and patience), and part two (vigour, meditation, wisdom).
   

Why do we have a sense of self?

This essay is part one of two in which I explore how contemporary ideas in neuroscience and evolutionary biology can help to make sense of the human condition and the Buddhist response to it. I begin with selfhood, the sense of being a 'self'. The notion of a self - having a self, being a self - comes in for sustained and often bitter criticism from Buddhists. I have argued in several blog posts [1] that it is not the self per se that is the problem, since without it we could not function, but selfishness or self-preoccupation. Selflessness, the opposite of selfishness, is not the absence of a self, but an attitude which values others at least as much, if not more, than one's self.

One might well ask why the very idea of selfhood - often the word 'ego' is used though it hardly fits the context - is so problematic for Buddhists? And if the sense of self is the root of all our problems, why do we even have it? Why did we evolve so unsatisfactory a faculty in the first place? I find the traditional answers to this question deeply unsatisfying and I know from talking to other Buddhists that I'm not alone in this. [2]

I've dealt with some of these questions in previous posts (see below) so here I want to look at where the sense of self comes from and why we have it. This is one area in which we need to quietly drop the tradition and find a better answer. I believe that neuroscience can provide a more satisfying answer to these kinds of questions, while leaving us the full scope of Buddhist practice as the best response the problems we encounter.

To my mind the best explanation for we we have a sense of self is put forward by Antonio Damasio in his book The Feeling of What Happens. Organisms, he says, are complex self-regulating mechanisms. Even a single cell is able to respond to changes in it's environment which allow it to survive better than if it were simply passive. So for instance if we are too hot we sweat, this fluid evaporates and this cools us down. This process has limits, but it enables us to tolerate a wide range of hot conditions, opening up ecological niches that might not be available otherwise. However sweating means we lose salt, and therefore we must ingest more salt. So the situation is complex and requires constant monitoring. In order to most successfully monitor our current state we need to compare a number of variables from the present (e.g. temperature, salt levels) with those in the past. Ideally we will have access to information about both the immediately preceding moment, but also to some longer term data which enables us to respond to trends in change. Even a single cell organism is able to monitor and adjust for such quantities as salinity, temperature, internal pressure, availability of food, light and dark, presence of predators, toxins, pathogens; and to do this without anything like sentience. We humans have a far bigger job. On top of each cell monitoring and regulating itself in concert with it's neighbours near and far, we have internal structures and systems such as organs; and we have an overview of the whole for maintaining things like balance, and readiness for action, and for the all important social interactions that we maintain. There is a vast, elaborate array of internal states at a variety of levels to keep track of. This is the primary function of our brain. We map all of this information in our minds - largely unconsciously - and keep track of it. This is the most rudimentary level of consciousness.

We also maintain archives of previous states: we can compare our present state to the immediate past so that we can respond to trends in the environment. If I am a little hotter now, but know that I'll be cooler again soon because it's late afternoon and the sun is getting low in the sky, then the need to cool my body is less urgent. Longer term memory enables us to understand trends and minor fluctuations better. But a consequence of this ability to compare our present state with many previous states is that we develop a sense of continuity. There is our map of our internal states now, and there are all these previous states. Demasio argues that the sense of continuity is an illusion. Consciousness is a series of discreet states of awareness, a snapshot of how we are now that can be compared with how we have been. This happens fast and often enough to give a sense of continuity - much like a film gives the illusion of motion by using 25 frames per second.

At some point in the evolution of this faculty the comparison of states begins to take in mental states. When it takes in the act of comparing then there is an element of self-awareness. We become aware of being aware, and because of the sense of continuity we have the feeling that there is a constant presence 'I' behind the observations and acting on them. However contra what most Buddhists say the 'I' naturally experiences itself as embedded in a complex web of relationships with the environment and other individuals. 'I' is not naturally alienated from these relationships. [3] Next week I'll look more at why 'I' has become alienated, and in two weeks will look at the 'I' as the basis for empathy.

This is not mere epiphenomenalism - the idea that consciousness is caused by the matter of the brain, and not the other way around - because it suggests that the demands of consciousness have driven the evolution of the brain. If anything the brain is an epiphenomenon of consciousness.

A further advance on this faculty is the ability to predict future states. This is the basis of imagination - the ability to project ourselves into the future and see if a course of action is fruitful, or if a situation is likely to be dangerous. It enables us to plan ahead, to predict the kind of impact the environment is going to have on us and to make preparations. It enables us to devise ways to overcome problems before they arise - by building a structure to keep the rain off before it comes, or planting crops that won't be harvested for several months, and to store food for winter or famine. Without the 'I' none of this would be possible.

The sense of being an embodied self, then, emerges naturally from the evolving faculties of the human organism, and it is important to our healthy functioning. However we are still left with the problem of suffering and what to do about it, which is the subject of next week's essay.

Notes

1. Links to my other blog posts on ego.
• Ego Again [20.2.09]
• Anatta in Context [24.10.08]
• The Problem of Self-preoccupation [11.3.06]
• Ego in the Spiritual Life [4.3.06]
  


2. Many people struggle to see how suffering in this life is caused by actions in a previous life for instance. Also on the one hand saṃsara is said to have no beginning, no first cause; while on the other Buddhist cosmogonical myths suggest that we have fallen from a pure state at some point in the distant past, and Mahāyāna Buddhists talk of original purity. This begs the question of how we became defiled! The Buddhist discourse on self (ātman) makes little sense, in my view, unless we understand the intellectual context of the day: for my take on this see Anatta in Context [24.10.08] So we're left with considerable ambiguity.
   
3. I looked at this in my post: The Meaning of oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ particularly with reference to Glucklich, Ariel. 1997. The End of Magic. Oxford University Press.